Fetch gamifies shopping experience with app, bites into chocolate sales

“After all of the price advances, everyone's taking units or slowing down. People are trading down to private label. They're saying no to fun ... and so, we're seeing real tradeoffs there that the consumers are forced to make because the dollar only goes so far. So, what we love to be able to celebrate is that we can help people have fun and save money.”

Gamifying the shopping experience

Fetch is a mobile app​ where consumers upload receipts to receive points for their purchases, redeemable for gift cards, with more points being awarded to sponsored brands. Fetch has “visibility [into] $152 billion in sales,” and 18 million consumers go to the app every month with 11 million receipts uploaded every single day, Hill said.

Upon opening the app, a Fetch user will see a screen of personalized offers based on the brands and retailers that they’ve shopped in the past. Fetch also works with its CPG customers to ensure that they aren’t “throwing discounts left and right when there's a huge chunk of the population that was going to buy their brand anyway,” she said.

“I like to tell my brand partners [that] I'm not going to subsidize your base because I already know how that consumer was engaging with your brand, so the offer for that person is going to look different than the person who has been buying your competitor for the last year, knowing that we want to engage these consumers in the cycle and the journey they're on with your brand. And then that's sort of the cycle that keeps on giving because then that consumer is getting more offers that are relevant for them.”

While Fetch remains “retail agnostic” and consumers can redeem points from many retailers, Fetch “can help [retailers] see outside of their four walls” and identify areas where they might want to focus, Hill said. 

“The consumer only gets savvier, as the phones have enabled them to have anything related to price ... around what they're about to purchase, they get access to reviews, price points, where it's held, the variety ... all of that is at their fingertips. And so, retailers are challenged. They are delivering on the consumer experience in ways that make sense, their online presence is more important than ever, and there's a way for us to screen value in all sorts of different forms to all sorts of different consumers, depending on the apps with which they engage.”

Fetch bites into candy sales, Halloween trends

With the data it collects from the app, Fetch can also provide data on product categories and track how specific brands are doing, Hill explained. Recently, Fetch analyzed 9.1m receipts submitted from Jan. 1 to Oct. 11, 2023, to understand what type of chocolate consumers are buying.

During the period, Fetch app users bought 2.6m chocolate bars, and the top five chocolate brands, listed as most popular, were Hershey’s, M&M’s, Snickers, Twix, and 3 Musketeers. Fetch also analyzed pricing trends for chocolate bars and tracked their month-over-month change in pricing for the first half of 2023. Chocolate bars started the year at an average price of $3.02 and rose to a high of $3.76 in May 2023 before dropping to $3.50 in June 2023.

Fetch is also able to predict when the best time to run a promotion is using its data, Hill explained. This year, Fetch changed its strategy on Halloween candy promotions for Mars, where they started the promotion earlier and ended it before the holiday instead of running it up to Oct. 31.

"We learned [that] we needed to start the offer way earlier and stop it way earlier because everyone's buying candy the week before Halloween," Hill said. "We optimized that tactic this year and we're still waiting for all the final final results, but it looks like we drove significantly more incrementality than we did last year as a result of shifting up the timing."